How many blogs discuss toilet paper? Well, count on us to get the vital information and get it out to you as soon as possible.

Buying the all-essential TP is a problem for me. I live in a 90-year-old house with one bathroom and the TP dispenser is built into a tile wall. Apparently toilet paper rolls have...swelled...since 1927, so much so that it's hard to find any that will fit. I have to pick through the assortment, of which there is no end. So to speak. This being a literary (or so I claim) blog I have to quote Winston Churchill who, asked about his visit to New York, said, "Newspaper too thin, toilet paper too thick."

So I finally picked out a package of Charmin. And it said, on the front, "...for a CLEAN you will notice."

Now, to be honest - and I'm speaking only for myself here I know - this is NOT something I really want to be noticing. Oh, sure, I can understand advertising its softness though I never planned to use so much that relative hardness would matter. Absorbent might be a good thing to brag about. They also mention the "diamond pattern" though I confess that entire days go by when I don't think even once about what pattern my toilet paper happens to be. But, at least, softness, absorbency and pattern don't make me think too much about what it is I'm doing with the stuff. "a CLEAN you will notice" makes me, well, notice. 

Advertising copy is written by my fellow nonfiction freelancers. Most people think of writers as novelists. When I tell someone I'm a writer they ask if I have written a book they might have read. And, by book, they generally mean novel. News flash, folks. 99 percent of all writing is nonfiction. And someone writes it.

If the Charmin company wants to get in touch, I can write toilet-paper wrapping copy too. I've done worse. I'd probably focus on the color. "It's white! When you're all done you can see what you did!"